Waiting...Waiting...Waiting...For the Damn Ad Server

We can't possibly be the only ones sick of seeing this upon visiting the many sites who for some odd reason insist upon using slow ad servers. In all honestly, we're not out to trash Falk but we've seen this particular slowness for years. Not months. Years. One would think after all that time, someone might say, "Hey, something's not right," and actually do something about the problem. Just as bad is AdFreak's use of CheckM8's Applet thingy that makes it impossible to do anything for about 15 seconds after visiting the site. We're sure our ad server sucks too but that's besides the point. After all these years of ad serving, why do we still have these issues?

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Comments

Comments

yepp, pretty much broken. Only getting
worse from here btw. Just wait until the
telco realize that they could charge a
premium for the delivery of ad traffic.

The delay fix is so easy: firefox + adblock
and the page load delays are gone.
Just lot's of empty space. Maybe one
day web designers will understand that
their page designs might be altered by
the absence of ads.

Web advertising is designed by people using high-end pc's/macs/what-have-you. They never seem to bother testing their stuff on garden variety machines before unleashing it on unwashed rubes like myself who only have a 1gb PIII, so it never gets field-tested as to potential consumer/viewer's actually viewing experience.

Typical ad-agency ignorance and elitism in action, if you ask me.

Posted by: Brent on April 17, 2006 1:43 PM

I actually try to be decent to advertisers and not go AdBlock crazy. The way to go into my AdBlock list is to delay the loading of a page, to do something to block content until I have read the ad, or to serve ads that look like Windows XP dialog windows.

Actually Falk is the problem, because it requires an ENORMOUS javascript to be downloaded onto your client to determine which ad to run. None of the other networks do this. Why? Because the server is a much better place to do this work, and much nicer for users who are already downloading the publishers page. Falk is the worst.

Posted by: A publisher on April 17, 2006 11:43 PM

well, it helps if the webmaster codes the page so that the slow-loading javascript doesn't delay the entire page (via iframes or clever use of CSS).

but yeah, the worst are definitely the ones that lock up the browser for long periods of time.

and Brent makes a good point too-- everyone forgets about the lower-end machines that are more common in the general populace.